At first glance, a book that suggests significant continuities in the poetry of William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Carl Sandburg seems unlikely, given the contrasting terms by which they have been canonized as modern poets. And a book that correlates their emergence as modern poets with the “labor problem” of the early twentieth century seems even more unlikely. Issues of poverty, labor, and the working class are, after all, the literary domain of realist and naturalist fiction, not poetry. If the poor and the working class mattered to modern American poetry at all, it was only during the presumably anomalous decade of the Great Depression. Given these deeply established assumptions that have structured US literary history, John Marsh's Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys not only proposes a new history of modern American poetry, it also bridges the divide between modernist studies and American studies that has made such a history unimaginable.

Studies of working-class life and American literature have proliferated in recent years, exemplified by the University of Michigan Press's Class: Culture series in which Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys is published. Americanist studies of social class and labor have mostly ignored poetry, however. And while there has been a sustained effort to recover left modern American poetry, especially since the 1989 publication of Cary Nelson's Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory, 1910–1945, this scholarship has mostly emphasized the 1930s. Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys is the first book to explain the impact of poverty and labor on modern American poetry prior to the 1930s. Marsh begins by addressing the historical “coincidence” that the decade in which modern American poetry emerged (1912–22) was also an extraordinarily tumultuous period of US labor history. He then argues cogently that the intersecting social, economic, and political issues that constituted the “labor problem” were integral to the formation of modern American poetry. Writing about the poor and the working class enabled “modern American poets to announce themselves as modern poets,” rebelling against Victorian and genteel criteria for the “proper subjects” of poetry (10).

Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys is hardly a celebration of modern poetry's attention to the poor and working class. Marsh, who also has edited You Work Tomorrow: An Anthology of American Labor Poetry, 1929–1941 (2007), admits the limitations of concentrating on canonical poetry that was presumably not interested in the “labor problem.” A more comprehensive account of American poetry and labor would, of course, include consideration of workers’ poetry. What makes Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys so coherent and compelling, though, is its critical inquiry into the significance of “romantic anticapitalism” in modern American poetry. If modern poets were mostly skeptical about capitalism and its effects on workers, they also tended to look nostalgically to an imagined precapitalist past as “an imaginative, potentially redemptive contrast to modernity” (10). Through his engaging and learned account of social, labor, and intellectual history, as well as his insightful discussion of selected poetry, Marsh underscores the distinctive predicament of modern American poetry: the problem of reconciling a disdain for capitalism, an interest in representing workers and the poor in their poetry, and a distance from Marxist critiques of capitalism that identify with the working class.

Readers interested in any of the poets featured in Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys will appreciate the thoroughness of Marsh's scholarship and the precision of his critical analysis of poems. The chapter on Williams's “suburban counterpastoral,” for example, examines how Williams made the pastoral form modern though his focus on laborers and the poor, while the chapter on Eliot's “labor problems” emphasizes how his early Cambridge notebook poems about urban working-class life anticipate his Bergsonian critique of modernity. The concluding chapter on Sandburg's Chicago Poems (1916) similarly traces the intellectual history of Sandburg's development as a modern poet, concentrating specifically on his engagement with the Arts and Crafts Movement and its critique of industrial labor. In writing about Millay's influential A Few Figs from Thistles (1920), the book that most identified her with “the bohemian ethos of free love and prodigal merry-making” (107), Marsh explores the contradictions of bohemian voluntary poverty and the involuntary poverty of the immigrant working class in Greenwich Village. Finally, the chapter on Hughes, McKay, and “the poetics of serving” is especially notable. Marsh not only elucidates the importance of “service literature” in the Harlem Renaissance, he also critiques romanticizations of jazz, past and present, through close attention to the cabaret workers featured in the poetry of McKay and Hughes.

Hog Butchers, Beggars, and Busboys, then, articulates an original and convincing account of the emergence of modern American poetry. In emphasizing writers whose shared interest in modernity is also a shared preoccupation with poverty, labor, and the working class, it is as timely and important for American studies as it is for modernist studies.